I ran into this small issue when I was asked to convert a text field into a Single Select Dropdown. As we were doing this for a demo, I thought I will try this little hack to avoid adding a table in database and whole nine yards.
I am not sure how useful this is going to be to someone but I am hoping that.. someday.. someone will benefit from this.
PS: Due to certain restrictions the following code snippet is missing appropriate closing script() tags. Kindly add them if you copy the code to use it somewhere.